What are some convincing arguments to upgrade from

Question

I have a client who is still using Visual Studio 6 for building production systems. They write multi-threaded systems that use STL and run on mutli-processor machines.

Occasionally when they change the spec of or increase the load on one of their server machines they get 'weird' difficult to reproduce errors...

I know that there are several issues with Visual Studio 6 development and I'd like to convince them to move to Visual Stuio 2005 or 2008 (they have Visual Studio 2005 and use it for some projects).

The purpose of this question is to put together a list of known issues or reasons to upgrade along with links to where these issues are discussed or reported. It would also be useful to have real life 'horror stories' of how these issues have bitten you.

Answer 1

Visual Studio 6 is not compatible with the lasted Windows SDKs, so it cannot utilize (at least easily) the latest OS features.

Answer 2

VS6 does not compile code according to the current C/C++ standard. For example,

• it has incorrect (outdated) scoping rules for loops. At least one MSFT SDK have been updated now with code that expects the correct semantics, so the SDK won't even compile with VS6 any more.
• It has trouble being able to compile all but the most trivial template constructs.
• It will compile some template constructs that have been declared illegal in recent standards updates (because the constructs don't actually do what normal users expect).

Answer 3

If they use the STL, they may be interested in the recently-released feature pack, which includes an implementation of TR1.

Answer 4

Unpatched VC6 STL is not thread safe. See here http://www.amanjit-gill.de/articles/vc6_stl.html, the patches aren't included in the service packs and you have to get them from Dinkumware directly (from here http://www.dinkumware.com/vc_fixes.html) and then apply them to each installation...

Answer 5

Not supported on 64-bit systems, compatibility issues with Vista, and it was moved out of extended support by Microsoft on April 8, 2008

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vbrun/ms788708.aspx

Answer 6

I have upgraded my stuff but it's relatively uncomplicated. A con to upgrade is VS 2005 DLL Hell